Ethnographies of children in Africa: Moving beyond stereotypical representations and paradigms (original) (raw)

Not Just a Victim: The Child as Catalyst and Witness of Contemportary Africa

Social scientists examining contemporary Africa take considerable pains to resist portraying Africa as nothing more than a land of victims unable to escape historical cycles of war, exploitation, and tyranny. However, children are frequently conceptualized as passive actors, mere extensions of adult societies and receptors of culture. The authors in this volume argue that children are dynamic contributors to the shaping of contemporary Africa. Through novel and unorthodox ethnographic research methods, each chapter provides insight into children’s perspectives on kinship, work, caring, health, migration and conflict, shedding light on children’s views and the vital roles they play in the emerging Africa of tomorrow.

Children in the African Postcolony: Sentinels of the Imaginary

Despite frequent castings as ‘objects of culture’ or passive, agency-less members of society, children occupy powerful positions within society as agents of culture. Children in the African postcolony, due to their unique temporality as children and the complex temporal experience of the postcolony, are striking examples of children’s ability to traverse social spaces available almost exclusively to them. In this dissertation, I argue that due to their unique position in the social representation of time, heightened by the particular experience of time in the postcolony, children in postcolonial African states stand sentinel on the frontier between ‘reality’ and the social imaginary and are subsequently able to cross and re-cross the border to the social imaginary as unique agents of culture.

Call for Chapters Childhoods in Africa

For this edited volume, we hope to have a coherent congregation of chapters presenting original research that focuses on the psychology, sociology and history of the condition of childhood in Africa. We intend to move away from the traditional examination of the child solely, to the exploration of childhood in Africa. We are also interested in the different rationalisations and conceptions of childhood, a diversity of aspects and ramifications of childhoods, from purely African and Africa centred perspectives. The enquiry into aspects of childhood, such as childhood belongings, and the cultures of childhood, has been most amplified in countries in the Global North of Europe and North America in recent times. Africa has a large youth population and children make up a significant percentage of that demography. Yet the study about childhoods in Africa is still in its nascency. Worse, the scholarly studies of the life of children in Africa have mostly looked at children as victims of social injustice and exploitation and persons living on the peripheries of the world of adults. But there are more regions, surprisingly happy and hope-giving ones, worth interrogating. These include creative expression in childhood, perceptions of happiness in childhood, childhood versus adultism, childhood spirituality, hijacked childhoods and brave negotiations of safe havens for self-expression, and child(ren) constructed understandings of the African childhood. The edited volume will bring together the composite analyses and interpretations and stories and case studies about various aspects of childhood in Africa by scholars who focus on African society, culture, education and history. It will investigate childhood and the child(ren) actor(s) across different stages of personhood development, and times and spaces on the African continent. The editors encourage contributors to submit works that are more inclined to the sociological and historical approaches of inquiry and analysis. The editors also seek works that approach the subject of childhoods in Africa from the interdisciplinary perspective. Thus, contributors

Beyond pluralizing African childhoods: Introduction

Childhood, 2016

This Special Issue of Childhood moves beyond stereotypical images of African children to document the complex ways in which contemporary realities and processes of social transformations shape and are shaped by children's everyday lives. In this editorial, we bring together perspectives that are drawn from 10 articles that report findings from six countries: Zambia, Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda and Ghana. The insights generated reveal the importance of looking beyond the 'deficit' model of childhood to instead theorize how children, through their engagements in social, economic, cultural and political life, contribute to the reconfiguration of social and generational dynamics that unfolds in Africa.

Excluded and Invisible Children in Africa

2013

In the report entitled ‘Excluded and Invisible’ the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) lists four factors as the root causes of exclusion of children from mainstream society. These are poverty, weak governance, armed conflict and HIV and AIDS (UNICEF: 2006). All four exist in Africa either individually or in combinations. The report further states that ‘at the extremes children can become invisible, in effect disappearing from view within their families, communities and societies, and to governments, donors, civil society, the media and even “other children”’ (Ibid). Excluded children may not be only invisible, they are unprotected as well, and exclusion is not simply a matter of the present, it impacts severely on the life chances and, consequently, the future of children. This paper seeks to explore the position of children in Africa, and to establish the extent to which these four factors have ‘conspired’ to exclude children from participation in life processes that have a d...

Engaging Children and Youth in Africa: Phenomenological and Methodological Issues

Representing research from east, central, west, and southern Africa, Engaging Children and Youth in Africa provides a well-balanced analysis of on-the-ground data with methodological and phenomenological issues that abound in much of research in Africa today. With an introduction that charts out some of the most critical approaches in African-centred research on children and youth, contributors to this volume give the reader a glimpse of the product of engaged research that places children and youth at the centre of analysis. The authors follow recent studies that have insisted on seeing African childhood and youth beyond constraining Western notions of vulnerability or innocence, to capture the ways in which recent advances in technology, the intensification of global processes, and continued weakening of the nation-state have not only contributed to new ways of being children and youth but how they have also provided a new lens through which to study social change.

Theologies of Childhood and the Children of Africa

2016

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Childhood in Africa between Local Powers and Global Hierarchies

affect the social organization of societies? Which type of schemata of practices and perceptions are disseminated through globalization and the attempt to universalize a specific conception of childhood? What type of resistance do these discourses face? Do they reinforce a pre-existing system of social relations? Or do they shape a set of dispositions that leads individuals to behave differently? The theoretical apparatus developed by Bourdieu constitutes a powerful tool to approach these complex and decisive questions, to grasp childhood in the current neoliberal era that contributes to reframing social dynamics of societies in the global South. Indeed, to tackle these questions, the main challenge consists of finding a way to analyse the transformative dialectic between institutionalized structures and embodied structures that shape the realm of childhood. Bourdieu theorised this dialectic through the relationship between two key concepts -field and habitus -at the heart of one of the most coherent and solid theoretical frameworks to engage in such an analysis.